COMEDY PUNCHES THE MUSLIM THUG & A PHOTO SPRING

DIPLOMACY BY RIDICULE

     Egyptian president Morsi, who is thugging his way along a path of repression and regression got mugged last night.  In a brilliant bit of "in your face" diplomacy, comedian and commentator Jon Stewart decimated the Muslim Brotherhood zealot.  Stewart defended his friend

Bassem Youssef, who has been called the Egyptian Jon Stewart.  

        Stewart's work, especially the last couple of minutes of the bit, beautifully demonstrates the difference between a nation of freedom and a place where zealots and fundamentalists would seek to blot free expression.

       This Washington Post piece provides good context, explanation and a link to Stewart's masterful defense of freedom.

       The visual quality is not quite as good, but this YouTube video also reprises the powerful performance.

      Do yourself a favor, spend a few minutes being entertained and come to see how precarious freedom can be.  

OUT AND ABOUT
TEXTURES & JUXTAPOSITION

SPRING TREES

See you down the trail.

COULDN'T BELIEVE OUR EYES, TRANSCENDENCE, PRECIOUS WATER AND WHAT ARE THEY?

A TRANSCENDENT MOMENT

     Something extraordinary happened in an awful moment on Easter Sunday.

     Louisville player Kevin Ware who had jumped to block a shot, came down horribly wrong, splintering his leg in a compound fracture that is as bad as any sports injury most of us have ever seen.

     Players collapsed on the floor, nearby fans were sickened and the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis was silenced, stunned and of a single mind, worried about the young athlete writhing in pain.

     His coach, Rick Pitino, is quoted as saying he fought nausea, others have said so as well.

     Clark Kellogg, who is great guy and a caring compassionate man was barely able to compose himself as he performed his CBS Sports broadcast role.  His partner Jim Nantz, another class act, also battled back tears, as did the fiercely competitive Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski.  

      For almost ten minutes cultural icons like Pitino, Krzyzewski, Kellogg and Nantz, wiped tears and worked on. The broadcasters evinced great concern for Ware and for his team mates who were in shock.  Even as Pitino and Coach K looked shaken, ashen and blinked tears, they were concerned for their charges and their well being.  We look at Division 1 athletes as men, as competitive stallions, but they are young men, some just out of high school.

      You could see people pray, the broadcasters said they were praying, later even the colorful Charles Barkley said he too was praying for Ware.

      In a moment, a highly charged and superb athletic ritual is dashed.  A young man lay seriously injured, on a playing floor, not a battle field.  The uniform he wore was that of a basketball player, not a soldier, cop or firefighter.  A terrible and ugly reality crashed into a cultural celebration.

Fans, players, coaches, commentators, in this framed world of hyper play, responded to their shock and dismay with an almost automatic response of care, concern and prayer.

      Young Kevin Ware, his bone protruding from his skin, who dreams of playing professional ball, in excruciating pain, uncertain of his future, continued to tell his panic stricken team mates, "Don't worry about me.  Just win the game.  Win the game."

      The thousands in the stadium and the millions of us watching television, have never seen anything like that before.  In the midst of a game, a horrible event prompts an almost universal concern and thousands or millions of prayers.  Something extraordinary, in an awful moment, on an Easter Sunday.

      

CLAY PLAY
wherein a new ceramic project from Lana provides an
interesting photo opportunity.

SAN SIMEON CREEK

    Our rainy season has been almost 50% deficient this year.

We are experiencing a couple of days of light rain and hoping the system slows to deliver more.  

    The photos were shot last week on San Simeon Creek, one of the two primary water sources for municipal wells. In a good year, the creek runs with a swifter current and the gravel bars are not visible, until late in the summer.  

     Talk of lifting a building moratorium to permit a "few" new construction permits a year seems ill advised in a drought year and at a time when some climatologists say we are in a drought cycle.  I understand the frustration of property owners who have been waiting years to build, but still, water is a precious resource and this year it is even more precious.

    See you down the trail.

THE WEEKENDER-UNIQUE

UNIQUE IN THE WORLD

     Jerusalem confronts and embraces you like no other city in the world.  The intricacy of its history and the depth of its impact on life seems to fill you at once with sound, echoes, aromas, textures and scenes that might well be planetary memories, broken into shards that you can feel and even seem to intuit.

     As Christians observe and celebrate Easter this weekend, the Weekender provides a beautiful and panoramic glimpse of this city like no other.  Watch this in the largest format  you can.

                                              

FACES
Luke and the Greenman

      To those to whom it is appropriate, Happy Easter!

See you down the trail.

DICK CHENEY IN JAIL-A LOT OF BULL-PEACE AND LIGHTNESS

WHY CHENEY SHOULD GO TO JAIL

   That is coming up, after first we share light, breezes, color and relief for those of you in places like Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and wherever else winter continues to assault you.

SPRING IN BLOOM

A SALAD IN SPRING TRAINING

DEDICATED TO DICK CHENEY

 A LOT OF BULL

 AND BULL DEBRIS

    We made our periodic visit to a grazing land to collect cow chips that we use in our compost.  I was thinking a lot about Dick Cheney.

    I was fuming a bit about the arrogance of man I consider a criminal, on several counts. Last night I watched the RJ Cutler documentary The World According to Dick Cheney airing on Showtime. The reviews are mixed though this LA Times piece by Mary McNamara hits on one point with precision.  Her father warned her to beware of a man with no regrets.  Cheney says he has no regrets.  

   Cutler zeros in on and documents two of the reasons Cheney should be tried.  One is the absolute lies, totally fabricated falsehoods he told Dick Armey to swing him around to approve an authorization to invade Iraq.  Remember those WMD's, suitcase bombs, etc, etc.  Cheney is a liar.  The other instance was when he told President Bush to ignore Justice Department rulings that domestic spying Cheney had ordered was illegal.  Cheney had intentionally kept W, who was already way over his head, in the dark about the building firestorm in the Justice Department and FBI about the illegality and irregularity of what he had done. Even the FBI director was threatening to quit if Bush did not change the guidelines. 

    I have said Bush was an idiot and I think I can prove it.  Cheney knew he had an intellectual light weight for a boss and he abused him, abused power and abused the American public.  Cutler's documentary is not at all a hatchet job, in fact it even lends a tacit credibility to a man who went from being a drunk to being drunk with power. Yet he does expose how even W, slow as he was, learned of his machinations and finally told aids not to take Cheney's calls and not to schedule meetings with him-this while they were both presiding over the needless deaths of American kids in a war that Cheney wanted, got and that his buddies at Halliburton and subsidiaries profited from.

    This is only the beginning.  As historians continue to examine and study the disastrous years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, his puppet master, Cheney's already low ratings will decline and his villainy will be further exposed.

    I hope the criminal lives long enough to be indicted.

THE FACES OF 13

   See you down the trail.

WAS IT THE MUSHROOMS & A PRO MOVES ON

DIDN'T WANT TO READ THAT

     I was sorry to read that Bob Cuddy a reporter and occasional columnist at the San Luis Obispo Tribune is retiring.

       It was obvious to me from the first time I read his work that he'd been around the block and was a solid journalist. Over the six years we've been on the central coast I've appreciated his skill, balance and good reporting.  His columns offered insight, good sense and posed questions when they needed pushing.  

      In the column announcing his retirement he quoted a John Steinbeck character who questioned if he had contributed to the Great Ledger. Cuddy questioned if all of his years in journalism mattered.  I think they did.

     Journalism is a tough job where you make few friends but can anger many simply by trying to get the facts.  From my view of his last six years, he did a great job. At a time when there are fewer experienced journalists who care enough to ask such an introspective question, the departure of an old pro like Cuddy is a loss.  His work had worth indeed.

                      RIP TO ANOTHER PRO

     Pulitzer winner Anthony Lewis died at his home in Cambridge Mass. at 85.  The former New York Times columnist was must reading for young reporters of a certain age in the late 60's.  He redefined legal reporting and court coverage.  Reading his column Abroad at Home or Home Abroad, depending on his location at the time of composition, was enormously helpful to those who cared about journalism, the judicial system and democracy.
                                       

WAS IT THE MUSHROOMS?

A DAY AT THE BEACH
A moment of relief for those of you still afflicted by winter.

   See you down the trail.

THE WEEKENDER-MAKING IT WORK

BRIDGES NOT WALLS

      On an assignment in Israel I spent time with a team of diplomats from both Israel and a Palestinian coalition.  They had been working together for a couple of years on purely business issues; access to air lanes, trucking, water and resources, shipment of material and finished goods and the like.  Their logic was that if the two sides were busy doing business, they would be less likely to be at war.  It was a back channel kind of diplomacy, but it was working. And the representatives from both sides had become friends, even entertaining each other in their homes.

       My friend Beverly sent this video which goes a long way to make that point.  Ending a week when the President visited Israel, our Weekender Video is an inspiration for what is possible.

DELICIOUS 

     Since our move to the California Central Coast we have

discovered that Paella is a favorite of many.  Here's a sampler.  Enjoy

    Have a good weekend.  See you down the trail.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR NEWS

A DISTURBING TREND CONTINUES

     It is the sort of thing working journalists would debate, fret and talk about endlessly-the quality of the work we did and the pressures that conspired to keep us from doing a better job.  Not enough people, not enough resources, upper management more concerned about profit than quality of product and in the case of electronic media less time to "think" about a story in the demand for more live coverage.

     Well, the problems have not gone away, but increasingly the consumers are.  The Pew Research Center documents the diminishing following of news out lets in this well presented and graphic rich State of the News Media 2013 report.  A New York Times piece on the report can be linked here. A bottom line is that viewers and readers believe they are getting a poorer product, less news and therefore are paying less attention and or reading less.

     The Pew report raises a fundamental factor-very few news consumers are aware of the drastic cuts in news gathering staffs, but they can sense that something is not right.

     After I retired from my post as a news executive I would hear from colleagues around the country as to how the recession was savaging their staff sizes.  In the industry there was plenty of attention given to the huge layoffs and cut backs, but very few of the public got that message.  They only saw smaller newspapers, lighter newscasts, fewer  original stories, less investigative works, more fluff and they've decided they don't like what they see.

     I had my share of animated discussions with corporate management about the economics of doing a good job and I was lucky to work in a non recessionary economy.  It was still tough.  Corporate wanted more profit, less operating costs while journalists simply wanted the ability to do the job people expected of us.  That might require more overtime, more personnel to handle the expanding expectation of not only feeding the hungry television but also the Internet and mobile platforms, new camera and editing gear to keep up with the demands, better graphic and support technology and so forth.  When the great recession hit, many news staffs were decimated by layoffs, cut backs though the demands for product were not reduced.

     The resource issue is one problem.  Another is the actual time, attention and energy it takes to produce material not only for a single edition or one or two news casts as in the past, but for an increasingly hungry media beast.  Now journalists work to produce for the paper or the main newscasts, but also must blog, tweet, post on Facebook, feed the web and be prepared to be on live, almost endlessly.  

     Sounding like an ancient now, when I started it was typical to cover an event, while a photographer shot film.  You'd drive back to the studio and while the film was being processed, you'd have time to think about the story, write it, edit it and put it on the air.  One of the last major stories I covered as an anchor involved rushing to the scene of a mid air plane crash, arriving at the scene even before fire and rescue crews, and going on the air almost immediately, continuing to report from the scene for 4-5 hours, gathering information live.  Had that happened today I suppose I would also have been expected to Tweet or send Instagrams.

     The more reporters are expected to do, the thinner the product becomes.  Another contributor to this "thinning" of the product is the relative age of the producer, reporter or writer.  We all started young, but there were some old hands around, who had institutional memory, understood nuance, could offer suggestions on how to add depth or history, or as we used to say, "knew where the bodies were buried."  Not so any more.  

      As I was explaining to a talented former colleague the other day, so many of today's working journalists in television and the Internet, don't have memories of how it used to be, they know only the manic and very shallow style of today's content production. And sadly, largely because of the marriage of the web and our celebrity worship, so much of what passes for news is gossip, celebrity coming and goings and items of no real significance.  Network morning news programs are also guilty of this thinning and shallowing.  So much of what they broadcast is hype for their own programs, or new movies. Cable news has decided to fill hours with pundits, pontificators, yakking egos, and a silly swill of what really is nothing more than a waste of time. There is a dearth of exploratory, investigative, serious, significant and explanatory journalism.

     So it should come as no surprise the Pew study finds that people are paying less attention and think they are getting less news.  They are, getting less that is.

WINDOWS